I enjoy every Planet Money episode I've found linked to from HN. Does NPR have an email notification for new episodes? Ideally, the email would contain a transcript.

Why not just subscribe to the podcast with a podcast player of your choice? You may have your reasons but I can't see how email would beat an established concept like podcasts/rss feeds when it comes to being notified about new episodes.

I've never seen email notifications, but they do have RSS, and there are some RSS-to-email services, like Blogtrottr and feedmyinbox.